‘Gbagbo trial indictment of ICC’
THE Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC), when it decides to open an investigation into grave human rights abuses writes up a situation report, which analyses the patterns of violence on the ground and identifies those most responsible for committing the crimes, within a given crisis.
In the current Laurent Gbagbo and Charles Blé Goudé ICC case, however, a recently leaked French diplomatic document reveals that on April 11, 2011 – five months before the opening of an investigation – the ICC’s prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo requested that Gbagbo, the former president of the west African country of Ivory Coast, be kept imprisoned until a country refers the case to the ICC.
Twenty high-level French diplomats were copied on the e-mail sent by the Africa director of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs Stéphane Gompertz, and were thus aware of the political manoeuvring to discard Gbagbo, a very popular president, from his country.
Ivory Coast saw a five months post-election crisis, which followed the November 28, 2010 election runoff between the incumbent Gbagbo, a historian, socialist and the founding father of the multi-party system in the countrty and its current leader,President Alassane Ouattara, who was prime minister under the dictatorial regime of Félix Houphouët-Boigny from 1990-1993, and then pursued a career in international diplomacy at the Central Bank of West African States and the International Monetary Fund.
To this day it is still not clear who won the elections, but Gbagbo at the time had been declared the winner by the country’s Constitutional Council and was officially sworn in as president.
He had also asked for a recount of the votes, which the UN refused. South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma, mandated at the time by the AU as part of a high-level panel of experts to act as mediators in the Ivorian crisis, was claiming Gbagbo had won the elections. Why Zuma did not push for a peaceful solution to the crisis remains a mystery.
A military intervention by the UN and French Licorne forces, as well as Ouattara’s Forces Nouvelles rebels, ousted Gbagbo on April 11, 2011 and arrested him.
Hours before Gbagbo’s arrest the incriminating French Foreign Ministry e-mail was sent.
The subject of the e-mail is revealing: an instruction to French diplomats that they should deny any French involvement in the dislodging operation.
Canadian international criminal law lawyer Christopher Black commented: “Of course this e-mail… if it is authentic is explosive.
“It shows that Gbagbo’s arrest was for political reasons, that the charges against him are thus fabricated, the defence team should demand a halt to the trial, call for Gbagbo’s immediate release and open an investigation into this criminality.”
But Ocampo confirmed to the German magazine Der Spiegel, which was part of the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network that revealed the ICC leaks, that his e-mails had been hacked.
Despite the confirmed authenticity of the e-mail leaks no action has been taken by any NGO or the UN to denounce the grave breach of due process.
Human Rights Watch, who even sent a witness to the ICC trial, also stated they had no comment to make. NGO Justice Monitor also said they had nothing to say, as they are only following the trial.
If the case was flawed from the beginning then the information collected by the ICC was misleading. In fact, a ICC Registry report on Victims’ Representations dated August 29, 2011 by Silvana Arbia and Didier Preira, stated they were not able to provide the chamber with any assurances or even estimates regarding the representativeness of the information gathered.
As for the crimes committed during the war by Ouattara’s Forces Nouvelles rebels – such as the Duékoué massacre of 800 civilians in just one day, on March 29, 2011 – the worst incident of the crisis – exposed at the time by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the ICC has not issued any arrest warrants against these perpetrators.
Former South African president Thabo Mbeki, who was a mediator in the crisis in 2004, as well as 2010, wrote the article, “What the World Got Wrong on Côte d’Ivoire”, where he recalls how the US ambassador in Abidjan, Wanda L Nesbitt, had already warned her government in 2009 that without some basic requirements fulfilled – a territorial and fiscal reunification of the country; the return of the national administration to the north; and especially the total disarmament of the Forces Nouvelle rebels implanted in the north since 2002; no democratic elections could be held.
More recently, Mbeki pointed out the illegal decision on the part of the ICC which did not drop the case against Gbagbo, although two judges out of three had in 2014 declared at the pre-trail stage that there was not sufficient incriminating evidence to begin a trial.
The EIC Court Secrets project published articles on an eventual honey trap dinner that Angelina Jolie wanted to organise in order to capture rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, Joseph Kony; and Ocampo’s off-shore accounts, which were most probably legal and as new Libyan client of his which has ties to General Khalifa Haftar.
Ocampo’s efforts, after he left the ICC, to have Kenya’s President Uhuru Kenyatta’s case withdrawn for lack of evidence, is also reported by the EIC as a lack of integrity on the part of the former prosecutor, yet the EIC journalists do not then go on to question the legality of Kenyatta’s arrest in the first place.
The clear breach of due process on the part of the ICC in the ongoing Gbagbo trial, which should according to some experts call for an immediate closure of the trial, was instead only reported by the French investigative site, Mediapart and not picked up by any of the other major European newspapers of the EIC network, leaving one to wonder why gossip is privileged over breaking news.
And last month, the ICC denied for the 12th time an interim release to Gbagbo.
Amnesty International (AI) denounced this as a violation of the presumption of innocence of the accused that has already spent seven years behind bars for his trial. Yet the illegality of his detention, following the evidence of a machination – revealed for the first time by the ICC leaks – was downplayed by the AI.
The April, 2011 regime change in Ivory Coast, heavily denounced at the time by Russia and India at the UN Security Council, was actually a continuation of previous attempts to reverse Gbagbo in 2002 – when rebels crossing the border from Burkina Faso occupied the northern part of the country, and again in 2004.
Since the Forces Nouvelles rebels had refused to disarm since 2002, despite the peace agreements that had called for their disarmament, Gbagbo planned to liberate the north from the rebels and reunify the country.
He was successfully disarming the rebels after just two days of military intervention when on November 6, 2004 two Sukhoi 25 aircraft belonging to the Ivorian armed forces (FANCI), and piloted by Belarusian mercenaries, bombarded the French military camp in Bouaké killing nine French soldiers, an American civilian, as well as injuring 49 French soldiers in the attack.
The French, accusing Gbagbo of the incident, destroyed the country’s entire aviation force.
What followed was another attempted French coup d’état stopped only due to the extraordinary non-violent resistance movement led by youth leader Blé Goudé, who called millions of people on to the streets.
The French forces shot at Ivorian demonstrators à mains nues (unarmed), which saw the death of 67 people and injuring over 1 000, but could not intervene militarily due to the crowds of people protecting the presidential residence.
On October 31, lawyer Jean Balan, who represents 22 of the families of the French victims of the 2004 Bouaké bombing incident, sent a letter to the French parliament to raise attention on what he thinks, after 13 years of investigations, was a French-orchestrated manipulation that begs urgent legal attention.
Balan asked that the French parliament take action as he feels the proceedings were gravely hindered, and although they had established that France’s former defence minister Michèle Alliot-Marie had lied under oath, no further action was taken and the case still remains pending, with no trial date in sight at the High Court of Paris.
The examining magistrate Sabine Kheris has requested to also hear Dominique de Villepin (then interior minister), Alliot-Marie (then defence minister) and Michel Barnier (then foreign affairs minister) before the Court of Justice of the Republic.
This is also pending to this day, 13 years after the incident.
Fagiolo is an Italian filmmaker who worked for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) until 2003. Since 2012, she has developed a documentary project, The making-off of Simone and Laurent Gbagbo, the right to difference. Fagiolo works for national and international TV channels, writing and producing reportage and documentaries.